Fediverse

having multiple accounts has been accepted as the “correct” way of interacting with fediverse?

No. You are right that there should be a better separation between your identity and the servers that you use to connect/interact with the fediverse. It just so happens that the existing solutions have been "good enough" for the majority of people, and there are many other issues (content discovery, reputation, server scalability...) that seem to be more pressing than that.

However, there are some other projects which are on the way to make it possible for people to use one server but have their identity separate. Mitra uses Ethereum wallets as a way to login to the server, while Takahe keeps separate domains for the server and the user's actor ids, which would let you, e.g, sign up with your own id to any server. This would essentially turn ActivityPub servers into a commodified provider, and people could migrate between servers transparently.

Yeah, I was endlessly confused that I couldn't use my social.technics.de account to login anywhere but Mastodon, as I'm pretty sure I had been promised. I suppose I eventually just accepted that I'd misunderstood some aspect of the concept but it did slow down my switch to the Fediverse considerably.

I'm in the same boat. Would be good to have the ability to have a single identity that works across the fediverse. As a first step if you have your own domain anyway, it'd be cool to alias that to different underlying Mastodon/Kbin/Pixelfed/etc. accounts. It's possible to some small extend using the "Webfinger" protocol: https://philna.sh/blog/2022/11/23/alias-your-mastodon-username-to-your-own-domain-with-jekyll/

Mhm, you could just add a link to your homepage to your bio which could help associate your various accounts to yourself.

Myself I had used several accounts to access several instances on mastodon, but soon after I realised that I could just follow tags and users across instances anyway, so why keep them alive.

I think being able to migrate your identity from one instance to another is a core requirement to fulfilling the promises of federation. The idea is to be able to freely leave a bad instance, but all you can do now is completely start over on a new instance, losing all your posts and followers. That's way worse, and not how it should be imo. No big instance has gone rogue yet afaik, but as soon as one does this will be a major issue!

To really accomplish that we would have to create a mechanism for a user to own their own identity, e.g. in form of some sort of secret key file. This would introduce a huge number of usability issues though! Handling key files is really hard, so that's probably not an option in the near future.

What we definitely should add is some sort of instance single-sign-on, so you can log into another instance by having your original instance authorize the login attempt. This should then allow the new instance to use your original account (for subs and posts), and also migrate that account to the new instance (update handle on all your posts, migrate your followers, ...). This would be a bit worse than owning your identity, because your original instance could just refuse to authorize any SSO attempts, but it would still be a big improvement imo.

Maybe we can also just combine the two, so instance SSO and being able to download an identity key as backup.

It seems my first message was not delivered, so here it is again (Sorry if it gets double-posted, I will delete the second one if the first one shows up, eventually):

I'm not sure whether AP has such a mechanism as an instance independent identity (to my knowledge: It does not).

The Fediverse, however, has: In the Zot (in Hubzilla) or Nomad (in (streams) ) protocol, identity can be moved or cloned between instances. Both (Hubzilla and (streams) ) are compatible with AP, so you can use this ID with most AP platforms - as long as they do not implement a non-standard AP version: Some people call what Mastodon implemented "Mastopub". But even then, this is more a problem for the other platform's side like Mastodon, usually the Hubhzilla devs make it work on their platform). Both also have a wide range of functions, so there is hardly and function you cannot participate in using Hubzilla ( (streams) is a bit more limitied for ease of useability, but still offers most relevant functions).

On these Zot/Nomad platforms, the login for the instance is not your identity. In fact, you can have multiple identities tied to your login. Also, the identity is not your webbie - The webbie is rather an attribute to your ID, like a primary key ID in a database. In fact, it's rather a link to your ID, so you change have multiple multiple webbies with your ID in parallel. This effectively means, I can login into multiple instances with various accounts, and still access the synchronized content for the independent ID (which is secured against fraud with a personal and foreign key/hash).

This has been named "nomadic identity" (I prefer portable identity, but I wording is not the key here). All connections / following / subscription within the Zot and Nomad protocol are handled via the ID, not via the webbie. Even non-capable platforms can connect to your primary webbie (which can be freely chosen and shifted...), and the protocoll implementation will deal with all requests to any of the webbies - as long as they exist. When you delete an account or instance, all AP connections are lost (as they, on their side, only know the webbie). All Zot/Nomad connections maintain the connection (as they address the ID which exists independent from / across all instances).

As I understand it, the Nomad protocol is a transitional step from Zot closer to AP, to demonstrate how AP would be capable to do the same, using the most recent protocol definition. So Mike (the main dev) tries to inspire the AP world to implement this on other platforms.

This was sent from my Hubzilla ID to Lemmy. I do maintain a Lemmy instance out of curiosity, but I prefer to use Hubzilla for everything. I could register a Mastodon, Pleroma, Funkywhale, or whatever ID on another instance. But what for...?

BTW: Hubzilla is even compatible with the diaspora* and GNU social protocol, even though at least diaspora seem to not support any compatibility efforts on their side. Hubzilla has been programmed around most of their quirks to make it work, although the do not care. (streams) ditched this burden and focussed on compatibility to Nomad, Zot, and AP.

If you have ever been cyber stalked, you may prefer to have anon avatars, names etc. Having been stalked I prefer to have the option.

Most of us are pretty innocuous but trolls, scam bots, agenda pusher, junk sellers, etc are not something I want …

Be safe.